Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

An intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants and indigenous people in our contemporary food system.   An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of how health equity is undermined by a normalization of migrant suffering, the natural endpoint of systemic dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression that clouds any sense of empathy for “invisible workers.”  Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is far more than an ethnography or supplementary labor studies text; Holmes tells the stories of food production workers from as close to the ground as possible, revealing often theoretically discussed social inequalities as irreparable bodily damage done. This book substantiates the suffering of those facing the danger of crossing the border, threatened with deportation, or otherwise caught up in the structural violence of a system promising work but endangering or ignoring the human rights and health of its workers.All of the book award money and royalties from the sales of this book have been donated to farm worker unions, farm worker organizations, and farm worker projects in consultation with farm workers who appear in the book.

Seth M. Holmes is an anthropologist and medical doctor, Chancellor’s Professor at UC Berkeley, Founder of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in medical anthropology, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, and recipient of a European Research Council Award for the project FOODCIRCUITS.Philippe Bourgois is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.Jorge Ramirez-Lopez (Triqui/Putleco) is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA in the American Indian Studies Center. He writes about Indigenous migration, social movements, culture, and politics.